Our civilization is a mess.
So much energy is misdirected; so much time wasted. If we imagine our civilization on Earth as an organism, then we would see humanity as an overbearing, overly complex system of resource exploitation with the majority of its energies engaged in direct or indirect warfare: class against class, religion against religion, humans against Nature. As a whole, this organism has pathologically turned on its host, the Earth. If we were to regard the Earth as a patient, then we'd have to make the diagnosis of severe illness with humanity as the pathogen. This does not bode well for us.
Why are we humans such poor custodians of our planet?
The short answer is that we have been, and continue to be, sold on lies. These lies exist to support the egos and illusions of megalomaniacal leaders: bankers, politicians, military bosses, CEOs and peddlers of God ... in brief, those who would charm, seduce or coerce us into giving up individual sovereignty and freedoms for the sake of security or convenience. Some conspiracy theorists are prone to see a plot under every doiley; that isn't exactly the situation. The truth is that mess begets mess, and humans are too selfish and short-sighted to collude efficiently enough to run a planet well. Obviously. It isn't yet very much in the human imagination to account for such factors as inevitability and the thing Alexander calls "the quality without a name" in his book The Timeless Way of Building, which can more or less be named as good fit with the Universe. Oh yes, there is such a thing, circumstantially. It is ephemeral—All is ephemeral, from a certain point of view—but it exists, improbably, sure as butterflies in the sun. We're just too busy strutting and fretting, projecting our egos like infants, to notice more universal perspectives that are obvious to elder minds.
We know what to do. You can't tell me that all the bigwigs of the world don't have a shred of wisdom to share among them. They certainly have been behaving unwisely, but they're in denial. We always know what must be done, but we choose not to—perhaps because we think we're addicted to convenience, or to what the neighbors think. Perhaps because our perspectives have narrowed to the four walls in which we find ourselves daily. We're too insecure to do what's necessary: to simply let go of all this centripetal control and pathologically intense nonsense and find our own ways back to Nature. Unfortunately, it's likely that it will take getting burned more severely than we have been by a century of world wars, cold wars, terror and hunger to realize in the collective conscience that we've sold ourselves short by believing in lies, pieces of paper and enfranchisement of figureheads rather than the simple, perhaps slightly less convenient truth of individual sovereignty. In so doing, we've become senseless for the sake of illusion—illusions, such as wealth, power, authority and fame, that have little or no spiritual significance. We are morally bankrupt because we've forgotten that civilization is primarily a spiritual endeavor. To deny this is to deny our humanity; it doesn't work. It leaves us empty and disconnected, and over time it corrupts the native beauty and integrity of our planet. We strut and fret upon the stage of life, projecting our egos over each other in endless conflict, believing that our purpose is struggle.
It's time to get a bit more imaginative than this. We're old enough as a civilization to stop crying and carrying on, making demands with clenched fists, and instead to begin to make historically informed choices and to tie our own shoes.
It's sad, but true: the Great Awakening of Humankind is long overdue and very straightforward. We give power to exploiters and charmers, liars and thieves, because we would rather be seduced by convenience than wake up and find our own ways. It's easier if someone else does it for us for a slight fee or tax. Why wake up and have breakfast in our own lives if such boring routine can be outsourced? Well, outsourced reality isn't reality; it's squandering a gift that wasn't meant to be squandered. And there is no routine. Each moment in life is unique, like a snowflake. Boredom is the product of lack of insight or poor perception.
Do you believe that your relationship with the Universe has something to teach you? If so, then when is the last time you stepped out of the noisy, cluttered and polluted reference frame of modern civilization to really notice the dance of leaves in the sunlight, to listen to birdsong, meditate and just be? The primacy of our relationship with the Universe as individuals is sacred and powerful, and opportunities for connecting with it have been crowded out, intentionally or not, by the machinations of the centripetal power system of Mesopotamian civilization.
It's all out of alignment with the truth. The truth is that we are civilization, you and I. There is nothing between us and Nature, or you and me, but illusion. Buildings. Roads. Prejudice. Preconception. All lies, convenient untruths shaped to imprison the mind. There are no chosen ones, no holy and anointed leaders! No Right Hand of God, nor Perfect Book. There is no chosen people. There is no One True Religion; instead, there are myriad perspectives, diverse as the stars in the void, all radiating their own unique spectra and true in their own relative circumstances. Do not be naive. Do not be complicit in your own senselessness. Choose not to surrender your sacred primacy and your individual sovereignty. Do not seek obeisance to another human mind; this is darkness and vanity. Rather than blindly following, seek your own fit with Nature. Once enough of us do this, the rest will follow. If we don't do it, then we will experience the full brunt of the collapse of all of these illusions as the ill-conceived and unnatural edifice of pathologically intense civilization comes tumbling down, crushed by its own dead weight.
Jedi are not anarchists or lawless. Far from it. We merely view laws as temporary necessities for the unruly. Laws are almost entirely necessary due to failure to both recognize and properly govern individual sovereignty, as individuals, out of love for the wholeness of All. In a very well-behaved and well-purposed classroom composed of students exposed mostly to excellent environments, for instance, one might expect a high degree of organized, cooperative and gainful learning behavior with very infrequent needs for the imposition of discipline. By contrast, in a class consisting of neglected students from chaotic or painful environments, one might expect much anger and acting out, to the point where constant and exhausting vigilance must be enforced in order for any collective progress to be made. It is possible, based on such social and situational observations, that human civilization can move significantly toward progressive from regressive by positively reshaping its environments.
The worst obstacles to achieving a collected, peaceful "classroom" as a civilization are overcrowding and gross inequities between rich and poor. There are many highly effective ways to deal with these without inflicting any sort of pain. Unfortunately, this is a planet where bombs are taken for granted as part of the daily routine, but sterilizing the destitute or the infirm in exchange for free medical care is considered a gross human rights violation. Perhaps part of this stems from the egocentrism of parenting in most cultures; many, if not most, parents are adamant about creating their own babies rather than adopting one of the many millions of starving, abused or neglected ones. And capping incomes? Unthinkable! Surely, a CEO is worth 1000 peons! Surely a grown man who has become a celebrity because he can throw a ball through a hoop or kick it through a goal is worth 1000 medical researchers!
How many of us must go hungry before we figure out that we've grossly exceeded our contract with Nature? How many of us blame God for human suffering, when we have harmless human sterilization techniques, virtually free energy technologies suppressed by oil cartels and opiates and marijuana that we refuse to distribute to those who are in pain? Our own fanatical and primitive inhibitions, combined with short-sighted egocentrism and a dash of conveniently flavored lies, separate us from pain-free lives in harmony with Nature. Nothing more or less.
Be alive, be entirely yourself and abolish senselessness. The purpose of consciousness is not to earn that next raise in order to afford the bigger car or house, ad infinitum. It is love. Love arises from fitting relationships with each other and with Nature.
Be kind to yourselves and each other. Cultivate mindfulness. Imagine community coexisting in simple harmony with Nature: long lives immersed in art and natural beauty, abundant friends and family and much less senselessness to worry about. Today's long lines, immersion in heavy traffic and toxic airborne filth, competition, debt, usury and senseless violence are all unnecessary figments of collective imagination. We co-create dystopia each day. Why not utopia instead?
